A Twin Thirsty on Following Directions.
- I have noticed an increase in the inability of students to follow directions, and I am no longer sad when it happens. I now see it as making my grading easier. Anyway, is this a trend those of you with 'history' can corroborate?
- I have students now who seem wholly incapable of not being able to follow directions, simple things like stapling, formatting, number of sources, counting! I flunked a few people this past term on assignments during the semester and nothing happened - no improvement. They made the exact same mistakes. I pulled them aside, explained what was happening. They nodded. They never improved. Is this a trend?
They haven't turned in their assignment yet. It's very late. I say to them, "Let's do it right now. I'll walk you through it, step by step by step...." They reply, "No, no, thanks. I'll do it this weekend. I've got to go wash my alpaca now." Monday arrives and the assignment is still not done. And they sit in class looking like everything's ok.
ReplyDeleteI got some improvement, but I had to laboriously point out what the kids had done wrong, and then explain WHY it was wrong. Good thing I'm trained in philosophy or that latter could get tricky.
ReplyDeleteYep. Every semester I see it in the papers they turn in. In the drafts I remind them of source types and number (Wikipedia should not be listed), how to cite, and that they need two sides for an argument. An alarming percentage do not make changes which is even clearer using Word's compare documents function! It does make grading oh so easy though.
ReplyDeleteI've been having them use google docs for submission for this reason: I can see what changes they made and how long it took to do them.
DeleteI allow my students to submit rough drafts for comments before the due date (only about 5-10% take me up on the offer, so minimal extra work and it gives some students an opportunity to improve). I had this one student who had done poorly on the previous paper talk to me afterwards to find out ways she could improve. I told her about the rough drafts being the most likely way. Before the final paper she duly submitted a rough draft which I commented on. I just opened up her final paper from the online dropbox and not only have no changes been made, but my original inserted comments are still in the text!
ReplyDeleteAside from this example, I have all the mundane problems with students following directions as well. No staples. Wrong citation format. Not double-spaced. Missing (easy) parts of the assignments spelled out in detail on the syllabus. Etc, etc.
I also have found my comments STILL in the paper! Annoying!!!
DeleteIn my senior year as an undergraduate student I did some homework grading for a junior level course (it was a TA-poor department, so the profs could hire UG students to do some grading).
DeleteOne student, taking the course for the SECOND time, re-submitted Assignment #1 from their FIRST time taking the course: red marks, poor grade (72%) and all.
AND Assignment #1 for THAT year's offering was significantly different from Assignment #1 from the previous year.
When I brought it to the Proffie's attention, he put his head on his desk and just sighed.I should have paid attention to that sigh, I think.
They simply don't care. That is, they bring to any class a set of behaviors that's intrinsic--it is how they relate to academics--and nothing we try to do will change that.
ReplyDeleteFor instance, it is impossible to make a certain kind of student staple the pages or write their section numbers on a homework set. I enforced this term a one-point deduction (out of eight points possible) for each of those infractions, and they continued to the very end. It must be that they make a quick calculation "penalty for noncompliance not high enough." Maybe if I gave the whole set a zero...but that seems draconian.
I'm starting to wonder if draconian measures are necessary to break them out of their narcissistic reverie. I desperately want to believe that there are thinking human beings somewhere underneath those layers of apathy and contempt and all they require is a sufficient jolt to surface.
DeleteOf course, this is where the hopes come into conflict with the requisites of college administrations, who are naturally opposed to such draconian measures. Especially for adjunct and contingent faculty.
Iskander:
DeleteDraconian measures often didn't work. I could take off points for, say, not adhering to standards that the students would deal with when they graduated and started working. Did they listen? Nope. They were all going to work for places where such standards wouldn't apply. (In fact, I had one kid tell me "We don't do that in our company." Then again, he was being groomed to take over daddy's firm, so who was I to tell him how things were really done? He already knew the answer, or so he thought.)
Snowflakes perceive instructions to be the same as "rules" -- and, as we all know, rules are bad, unfair, mean, etc. Thank goodness failure to follow rules on assignments doesn't usually have the same degree of consequences as failure to follow rules on the road -- like DON'T TEXT WHILE YOU'RE DRIVING. (That's another rule deemed bad, unfair, and mean by the snowflakes.)
ReplyDeleteI just posted this on FaceBook: Dear university student: Let us review what happens when I give an assignment. I present it in class, projected on the screen. We go through it line by line and the class has the opportunity to ask questions. If anything is unclear, we work on the wording and make sure it is clear. I then post the class-approved assignment online and I usually send an announcement to say the assignment has been posted. If more than one student sends me a message to say they don't understand an element of an assignment, I send a clarifying e-mail to the whole class. So when we get to the end of term and you lodge a complaint with the Chair of the department that my assignments are either unclear or vague, you won't have much credibility and my respect for you might be diminished.
ReplyDeleteThis term I had a knot of princesses (I use the term in a gender neutral fashion) who did not do assigned readings, attended sporadically, left early when they did attend, did not follow instructions, surfed the web during lectures and could never answer a question in class (usually because they were doing something unrelated during the lecture) - and although I am a fairly generous grader (the class averages prove this - students at their skill level should be thankful I am not a hardass) I come to the end of term and this little knot of princesses has posted their outrage on RateMyProfessor and in letters to my Chair. I would dearly love to take them aside and gently tell them it is time to grow up now.
I had that all the time while I was teaching. In almost every course, I had students who behaved as if standards for their work and rules of behaviour didn't apply to them. They fought any measures to correct it and frequently filed complaints about me. Worse yet, there were administrators who supported them.
DeleteMost of those students were young and seriously needed to grow up. Some were older, often having worked for a while in, say, a trade and there was no way they were going to comply with what I told them.
No matter what I did, I wasn't going to win.
Another addition to the Mantra List: It is time to grow up now.
ReplyDeleteWhat I'm seeing is, I think,more resistance to following some directions than inability to follow same. A substantial minority of my students really, really, really, really want to do something they have already done before. Ideally, they'd like to simply hand in something they already have, but, barring that, they want to complete an assignment that is very much like numerous assignments they have already completed more or less successfully. Even when (perhaps especially when) the directions make it clear that this is not what it required, many of them will try to do whatever they feel more comfortable doing at least once before engaging in some way (including complaints of unfairness, repeated claims of not understanding, etc. etc.) with the actual assignment prompt.
ReplyDeleteThere's also the fact that some of them seem to read the first sentence of a two-page assignment and imagine what you want (probably based on prior experience form there), or read every third word, or something.
tl:dr: I think the question is not so much "can they follow directions?" as "do they read, comprehend, and make any effort to follow the directions in the first place?"
Not in my classroom, but of course in my classroom the penalties for not stapling right are rather severe... MUUAA-ha-HAAAA!!!
ReplyDeleteThey don't read any more, they skim. They half listen. They are on Twitbook.
ReplyDeleteDo you know what I actually did this past term? I dared to request that no laptops be used. None. If no one cracked a notebook, I would post my slides on underwater hamster fur weaving. Would you believe it? They refrained, and we have had some great discussions in class. Second week of class one guy drops by who had missed the orientation. He cracks open his laptop. "Oh," I said, "does that mean that you don't want anyone to have the slides?" He got told to put the thing back in his bag from his fellow students - and he did. Now we'll see if the finals are better, and if they, at least, can follow the directions.
I just graded finals. 50% of this final was short answers with the phrase "answer in complete sentences" bold and in large font.
ReplyDeleteI already have my first complainer: "How can I get 50% on a writing test?"
Nope, not going to respond. In part because, you see, it wasn't a writing test.
@Suzy: I need your slides!
ReplyDeleteDarn you, CM! You stole the topic of my next post. Well, not quite. But there's some overlap. But post I will soon enough.
ReplyDeleteThis term I saw instances of inattentiveness that would in other contexts cry out for neurological diagnosis. It really is that bad sometimes.
Please do post, I'm interested in what you have.
DeleteMy husband assigned a 3-5 minute ungraded presentation to summarize term papers, which were to be turned in at the end of the class on presentation day. The idea was that each student would have a deep (at the intro to basket weaving level) look at one topic, but get to see a short presentation on everything else. To reiterate: the presentation was to summarize the paper.
ReplyDeleteOne young man did a very nice 4 minute presentation. On his way out of the room he noticed the pile of term papers growing as each of his classmates made an exit. When he got to my husband's desk he said "What term paper?"
Later that night he e-mailed a "paper" titled: Summary of my Presentation.